PVC NAB 2011:  Petrol Cambio Suitcase

We all drag out rollaboards with us on airplanes…why didn’t we think of building a tripod into one?

PVC NAB 2011: Markertek VPTR1 Production Trailer

Often there is no substitute for remote multi-camera production.  Markertek offers a way to make it happen without the multi-million-dollar sticker shock.

PVC NAB 2011: Litepanels Sola ENG Light

Sunguns have come a long way in the last five years.  Here’s Litepanels latest - with an actual Fresnel lens, focusing and a dimmer to boot.

REVIEW:  Canon XF305 Camera

It’s hard to believe that twelve years have passed since I bought my first DV camcorder.  My 1998 purchase?  A Canon XL-1.  At the time it was just about the closest thing you could buy to a professional camcorder for under $20,000.  I remember my engineer-friends sniffing at the XL-1.  Their biggest gripe?  That DV only recorded 480 lines of video (instead of a full 486,) at only 25 MBit/sec in a 4:1:1 colorspace.  “No TV station will ever air that (expletive),” they barked.  Boy, were they wrong.

Canon kept coming out with updated versions of the XL-1, adding better viewfinders,  some excellent lenses, and finally HDV capacity.  But somehow the XL-series never seemed to gain the respect among broadcasters that their world-leading"big” lenses enjoy, possibly in part due to perceived “bandwidth bias.”
Well, Canon has knocked that final issue out of the park.

Let’s Clean Up That Shot - Beforehand!

We’ve all gotten our footage back to the edit bay and found something we didn’t want in the frame.  Light stand, audio cable, water bottle, you name it.  What if we could remove irritants from the picture BEFORE the fact - without actually moving anything?  Check the next page for an amazing demo.

My Adobe (Non-)Switch Story

I can clearly remember my first experience with Adobe Premiere.  It was in the early 1990’s, and I was working full-time in the News Department at Wisconsin Public Television.  I had managed to talk the news director into buying me a really new-fangled device – a desktop computer.  I believe it was a first-generation Pentium, maybe 90Mhz.  I had been into computers since about 1984, and had composed music and scored a lot of TV programs using Atari computers. Geekery was in my blood.  So once I got the Pentium, I was poised on the launching pad for what was to come.

And then I got a copy of Adobe Premiere, version 3 I think it was.  And I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.  Strange, buggy, crash-prone, you name it, it was just not good.

Roku Gets An Update

It seems inconceivable that I first recommended the Roku box over two years ago, but it is true.  This is one of the times when being an early adopter has been a great experience - with every passing month, the Roku has gotten more functional and has added many more channels, including Pandora, Leo LaPorte’s TWiT Network, Vimeo, Revision 3, MLB.com, Flickr, and dozens of others.  Of course, not all of the channels are to everyone’s taste, but you can usually find something to watch in there.

Engadget has just posted a fairly in-depth review of the new Roku XDS box, with support for video up to 1080p (there is some of that on Vimeo, but not much anywhere else - yet.)  When the baseline Roku HD only costs $59, that falls into impulse-buy territory for many folks. Seems like this is a harbinger of even more splintering in the distribution business, and it is exciting to watch. 

ivi Goes For The Throat

Got an interesting email last week from a company called ivi.  (yes, that’s a lower-case “i”.)  Maybe you got it too.  It contained a link to an application for Windows computers which allows them to receive the over-the-air broadcast signals of stations around the US.  The initial list is pretty comprehensive, including network affiliates in New York City and Seattle.  I downloaded the app, and it is really pretty slick, with decent (but certainly not HD) picture quality.  The business plan seems to be to charge users $5 a month or so for access to scads of TV channels over the Internet.

Of course, most of the broadcasters in the US look poorly on anyone re-transmitting their stuff.  But the interesting twist to ivi is that, instead of waiting for the network lawyers to come disembowel them, they are taking the fight to the networks - through the court system.  As soon as the service launched, ivi was snowed in with a blizzard of cease-and-desist letters from NBC, ABC/Disney, CBS, WGBH and others.  However, ivi seems to think that re-distribution of broadcast signals over the Internet is allowable due to a gray area in copyright law.  From an ivi press release:

The Complaint states that ivi is legally operating under U.S. Copyright Law. According to section 16 of page 3 of the Complaint, “The Copyright Act expressly authorizes secondary transmissions of copyrighted works embodied in primary transmissions. For example, the Copyright Act expressly approves of the secondary transmission of an original television broadcast where the secondary transmission is subject to a statutory license. Under Section 111 of the Copyright Act, statutory licensing fees are paid periodically to the Register of Copyrights in accordance with an established scale and schedule. Section 111 further provides that the secondary transmission of an over-the-air primary transmission is not an infringement of copyrights in the works contained in the primary transmission.”

So, if I read this right, if ivi pays the federal Register of Copyrights previously-set fees, the airwaves are fair game.  Of course,

I Am Not A Lawyer !!!!! ,

so my interpretation of THEIR interpretation might be (and probably is) flawed. And even if they do win this case, you can assume it won’t take long for the pertinent sections of copyright law to be tightened up and exclude such signal-....  what’s the proper term?  Jacking?  Theft?  Rebroadcast? Entrepreneurialism?

Keep an eye on ivi.  Even if they get crushed, this is a subject that is going to come up over and over in the next few years.

And by the way…

I Am Not A Lawyer !!!!!

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